“Can you stand?”
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. Low, roughened, with a strange shape to the vowels—like someone speaking through a mask they’d worn too long.
I ripped my gaze up.
He was close enough now to see the lines of him: armor fitted over a body built for fighting and then punished for it, an odd jointing at the shoulders where plates met, and a helm that hid his eyes behind a dark, slanted lens. His jaw, bare beneath the helm’s lower edge, was a map of small, silvered scars.
“Can you stand?” he asked again, softer.
I nodded because my mouth didn’t trust me yet.
He reached—slowly, palm up—and I flinched before I could stop it.
He froze.
Then he turned his hand so I could see it wasn’t a weapon.
The skin there wasn’t like ours. Darker, patterned—scaled in a way that caught the light like polished stone. Not slick. Not reptile.
Something else.
Something alive.
Behind him, a gun cocked.
He pivoted faster than a blink, body angling to shield me.
The shotgun’s roar punched the ditch.
His shoulder jerked; his armor took most of the blast, but blood spilled dark down the seam.
He didn’t make a sound.
He just moved—low and lethal—and the shotgun man went down clutching his throat, surprised to find it empty of air.
Silence fell like ash.
My ears rang. The only sound left was a horse’s quaking breath and my own ugly rasp.
The stranger turned back to me, blood seeping along his upper arm. He reached again—careful, telegraphing every inch.
When I let him, his hand wrapped my forearm with a pressure that would have been tender if not for the steadiness of it. He pulled me up out of the ditch like I weighed less than the shadows.
“More will come,” he said. “We must move.”
“Ben—” I staggered. Ben lay where the shotgun had put him, eyes open to a sky that was suddenly too bright. I took a breath that hurt. “We can’t—”
He looked, and there was something in the angle of his head—a slight bow that might have been respect.
“I am sorry,” he said simply. “We cannot stay.”
“What are you?” It slipped out raw, ridiculous.
His helm tilted. “Rygnar,” he said, as if that answered everything. Then, gentler: “I will not harm you.”
The raider leader groaned and rolled.
Rygnar’s gaze flicked toward the sound. He released my arm and scooped up a fallen cloak. He shook it once and tossed it over the man’s face—not to hide him, but to keep dust out of his mouth.
